Breadcrumb

How to reduce the environmental impact of new inventions?

Click the cogwheel in the bottom right corner of the video to enable subtitles

Share:

About the research

Too often, companies take too little account of the environmental impact of their inventions when developing new products. Gwenny Thomassen (Universiteit Hasselt) wants to change this: she developed a model to calculate both the cost price and the impact on the environment for products based on micro-algae. In this way she wants to help companies to market affordable ecological products.

Sustainability

Economy

Gwenny Thomassen

UAntwerpen - UGent - UHasselt

By combining insights on both costs and environmental impacts, Gwenny Thomassen aims to help new sustainable technologies find a way into the market. For her PhD research at Vito and Hasselt University, she integrated methods to assess profits and environmental impacts of new technologies and applied this to microalgae biorefineries. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Policy Research Center Circular Economy at the Universities of Ghent and Antwerp, she focuses now on the role of learning effects.

Contact Gwenny

Gerelateerde video's

Tim

Croes

KU Leuven

Making plastic out of wood

What if we could make plastic out of... Wood waste? This is already possible today, but unfortunately the technology to make such bioplastics is not yet fully developed. Tim Croes wants to help change that.

How to make the invisible soil life visible?

Soil biodiversity in our European forests is in bad shape. By focusing on public awareness, Iris Vanermen wants to help keep our forests healthy, so that we and future generations can enjoy them for a long time to come.

From biomass to renewable bioproducts

Ever heard of pyrolysis? Then chances are you have a self-cleaning oven. But pyrolysis more than a fancy option in a modern oven. Willem Vercruysse uses this method to make fertilizers and water purification products from microalgae and ivy.